Hunting Meteors and Lunch Lines With an Army of iPhones

That dinged, scratched iPhone with a cracked screen you’ve been holding onto can get a new life as a live-streaming portal to the view outside your window, or so says San Francisco startup Koozoo, which made its public debut Thursday. Koozoo’s iOS app captures live video of public spaces from your iPhone and shares them with the community of others who record their own streams. After covering the company’s funding in December, we tried out Koozoo for ourselves to find out if smartphone streams are as useful and interesting as the startup wants us to believe.

The Koozoo app is easy enough to set up; you sign up with Facebook or e-mail and you can begin browsing video streams. The “home” feed shows the most popular videos based on number of views, and highlights picks from the Koozoo team. You can also select video streams created closest to you on a map, or search by location.

The magic comes when you fire up your own feed. With a tap of a button, your iPhone’s camera activates and begins recording and streaming almost-live video (there’s a few seconds of delay). Where to point your camera is up to your imagination, so long as it’s recording a public space. So far, the Koozoo community has gravitated to three main views: weather, traffic, and business lines. “We’re going to be led by the community, it’s up to them to do with the technology what they want to do,” says Koozoo co-founder Drew Sechrist. “We think that over the course of the next few years we’ll see dense networks of cameras in major metros, and you’ll be able to virtually change your point of view live, anywhere inside of the city.”

Wired’s Koozoo test stream of HRD Cafe. Screenshot: WiredFor my own Koozoo feed, I pointed the camera towards the street front of HRD Cafe, a SoMa, San Francisco diner that often has a long lunch line. About 30 seconds after I started recording, my video showed up on the app’s map and I could watch the stream from another phone and Koozoo’s website. Other people with the Koozoo app were able to watch the stream from their phones, or I could share a link to the video via e-mail or Facebook so that anyone can watch it from a mobile or desktop browser.

After watching a handful of streams, it was obvious why relatively mundane video streams can be so useful. Mixed in with video of garage entrances and random alleys, there are beautiful city views and valuable shots of city traffic. My favorites include a stream of the Highway 280 on-ramp in San Francisco’s SoMA district and a shot of the Pacific Ocean from above Baker Beach, which can tell me if there’s fog at the coast. Aside from capturing regular city life, Sechrist believes there’s the potential for his army of smartphone cameras to be on the scene for major events. “Most of the time maybe the view out your video is fairly boring, but then every once in a while a meteor streaks across the sky and explodes,” he says. “In that moment you have the most interesting view on the planet.” We were only able to see the meteorite that struck Russia because someone had a car dash cam. Koozoo is confident it can replicate that same kind of visual accessibility with our unused smartphones.

During the beta and into the public launch Koozoo is only accepting feeds from San Francisco and Austin, Texas so that Koozoo employees can personally evaluate feeds to make sure they are appropriate for live view (video of pornographic material, illegal activity, or baby cribs won’t be accepted). As the company expands into as many metropolitan areas as it can, Koozoo will rely on a computer program to vet the video before it goes live.

The Koozoo app is available for free in the App Store starting Thursday and works on the iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, and 5, and the iPod Touch. In order to get more people streaming, the startup will send you a free mounting kit to suction-cup your phone to a window after you download the app. The startup is also looking for other incentives to attract users. “The more you feed into the network, the more you’ll be rewarded,” says Sechrist. “We’re just going to constantly make it awesome to be a contributor to Koozoo.”

Looking around San Francisco, it’s easy to spot windows that would furnish interesting or helpful Koozoo streams. There’s already a smartphone recording the line outside Tartine, one of San Francisco’s busiest bakeries, but for my own selfish benefit I want a stream of the line at Ike’s Place (a popular sandwich joint) and the 101 freeway on-ramp at Market (a frequently congested area). In return for those videos, I’ll offer up a stream of western Golden Gate Park when Koozoo’s Android app launches.